JAWS

The Revenant review – gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytelling

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Spielberg’s vintage nerve-shredder pits three men in a shabby boat against three tonnes of muscle and knives. Out on the open water, the supposed marine experts flounder: shaggy man of science Hooper bungles his strychnine-laced harpoon plan while pickled captain Quint ends up going down with his ship. It’s left to Great White Dope Brody to deliver the fishy finisher, exploding the lethal maneater into chunks of bloody chum by igniting a compressed scuba tank stuck in its maw. What’s the takeaway? Consider a bigger boat, for starters.

THE GREY

This chilly, mournful tale of stranded oil workers clashing with ultra-territorial mega-wolves looks like it takes place somewhere beyond the edge of the world. With both factions equally hairy, bad-tempered and smelling of musk, Big Liam Neeson’s team decide their best approach is unfocused aggression. Nowhere is this more effective than when sketchy roughneck Diaz (Frank Grillo) shanks a lurking lupine scout several dozen times before sawing off its head and throwing it back where it came from.

SNAKES ON A PLANE

The convoluted set of circumstances that gives Snakes On A Plane its idiot charm means you wouldn’t bet on it containing any transferable skills for dealing with a venomous snake attack in the real world. But the flying circus of shonky pythons isn’t completely pointless – it turns out that improvising a flamethrower from hairspray and a lighter is pretty effective at killing cobras, even if it’s too little, too late to save the unfortunate male passenger with an asp clamped to his johnson.

THE EDGE

Another Revenant-style bad news bear, scaring the bejesus out of billionaire cuckold Anthony Hopkins and fashion snapper Alec Baldwin, who are already having a pretty rum time of it having barely survived a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness. Their attempt to neutralise the bellicose, badass Kodiak with an Indiana Jones-style booby trap of sharpened sticks is almost hilariously ineffective; in the end, it’s the bear’s own bodyweight that does for him, skewered on a well-anchored spear.

THE BIRDS

The original and best Angry Birds movie illustrates there are some fights with nature you simply can’t win, especially when the enemy is so abundant. Among the eerie scenes of beady-eyed fowl freaking out their human foes with synchronised staring, there are a couple of salutary lessons about how to fend off such pecks offenders: avoid telephone boxes and children’s playgrounds, and – if all else fails – barricade yourself inside a house, block up the chimney and be very, very quiet.

Studio denies report Leonardo DiCaprio is raped by bear in The Revenant

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BLACK SHEEP

History does not record whether Denis Healey ever saw this Kiwi horror-comedy, a film that takes the late Labour peer’s put-down – that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was “like being savaged by a dead sheep” – as its mission statement. The gambolling creatures we habitually count to get to sleep are recast as necrotic nightmares, a World War Z-style rolling wave of bad baa juju. Turns out the best way to kill a zombie sheep is to stage an impromptu barbecue, as our nominal hero combusts the rabid flock’s flatulence with a flying Zippo. A sick burn? Healey might have approved.